Michaelmas

Today, 29th September, is the feast of St Michael, or, as it was known in the Middle Ages, Michaelmas (the name is a shortening of St Michael's Mass). This day was an important one in the medieval calendar, as it was one of the four quarter days - the others being Lady Day (the feast of the Annunciation, 25th March in the modern calendar), Midsummer Day (24th June) and Christmas - on which accounts, rent and wages had to paid. Servants' terms of employment were also counted from one quarter day to the next, and on big manors or estates, Michaelmas was usually the day on which the reeve (who might be very loosely described as the chief peasant) was appointed.

The four quarter days roughly correspond with the four seasons, and in England Michaelmas was (and is) regarded as the start of autumn. The michaelmas daisy, which flowers in late September, takes its name from St Michael's feast day: 

Michaelmas Daisy. Image in public domain, via

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight specifically mentions Michaelmas. Its approach heralds the onset winter, reminding Gawain that he must leave the safety of the court at Camelot and set out on his search for the mysterious Green Knight, whom he must find by the new year:

Bot then hyyes hervest, and hardenes hym sone,

Warnes hym for the wynter to wax ful rype;

He dryves with droghyt the dust for to ryse,

Fro the face of the folde to flyye ful hyghe;

Wrothe wynde of the welkyn wrastles with the sunne,

The leves laucen fro the lynde and lyghten on the grounde,

And al grayes the grese that grene was ere;

Then al rypes and rotes that ros upon fyrst.

And thus yirnes the yere in yisterdayes mony,

And wynter wyndes ayayn, as the worlde askes,

           no fage,

Til Meghelmas mone

Was cumen with wynter wage.

Then thenkkles Gawain ful sone

Of his anious vyage.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight l.521-35, in ed. A.C.. Cawley Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London: Everyman, 1970)

Medieval (14th century) depiction of St Micheal defeating the dragon (Satan), via. Note that St Michael's shield actually bears the cross of St George!

New Zealand seasons being topsy-turvy to the English ones, we are currently enjoying a very passable imitation of spring as described by the Gawain poet, which you can read here.

Officially M.A.

A few photos from graduation yesterday, courtesy of Daddy, Harry, Sebastian and the University of Auckland...

On the march

Where's Wally?

On the terrace of Old Government House

photo by University of Auckland

Hogarth Shakespeare & Nutshell

Today I came across the Hogarth Shakespeare Initiative, which, in its own words, "sees Shakespeare’s works retold by acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today." Some of the plays have already been 'done' - Howard Jacoboson's Shylock is My Name (The Merchant of Venice) and Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time (The Winter's Tale.) Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed (The Tempest) is due out next month.

A good idea? Not sure... but certainly an interesting one. You can read more about it, and see scheduled books in the series, here: http://crownpublishing.com/hogarth-shakespeare/.

Not part of this initiative, but in a similar vein, is Ian McEwan's Nutshell. This is a modern-day retelling of Hamlet, with rather a neat and original twist: the story is told by Hamlet while still inside his mother's womb, privy to the murderous plotting of his mother and uncle. This highly unusual point of view, combined with the fact that I have a weakness for all things Hamlet, was what made me buy the book.

Gertrude becomes Trudy and Claudius Claude, but apart from this the book is less faithful to the plot of the play than to its language and occasional rambling bouts of philosophy. Hunting these down was, for me, half the pleasure of this book, but it is well-told and well-written (though sometimes almost unnecessarily graphically) in its own right. Some reviewers have described the book as a 'thriller,' which seems to me something of an overstatement, but it is genuinely suspenseful.

A great deal of the play's language is neatly worked into the fabric of the novel. This is sometimes bold (the re-working of the "What a piece of work is a man" speech), more often subtle (Hamlet's descriptions of his mother, father and uncle), occasionally defiant (the last line of the book is "The rest is chaos"). The book's title, of course, comes from Hamlet's "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."

Happy birthday Bilbo Baggins

Today, as every true Tolkien fan will know, is Bilbo Baggins' birthday (also Frodo's, but his name spoils my fancy and very Middle English-esque alliteration. Sorry, Frodo.)

What better opportunity to quote Tolkien. Here is part of his description of the preparations for Bilbo's one hundred and eleventh (eleventy-first) birthday party:

Days passed and The Day drew nearer. An odd-looking waggon laden with odd-looking packages rolled into Hobbiton one evening and toiled up the Hill to Bag End. The startled hobbits peered out of lamplit doors to gape at it. It was driven by outlandish folk, singing strange songs: dwarves with long beards and deep hoods. A few of them remained at Bag End. At the end of the second week in September a cart came in through Bywater from the direction of the Brandywine Bridge in broad daylight. An old man was driving it all alone. He wore a tall pointed hat, a long grey cloak, and a silver scarf. He had a long white beard and bushy eyebrows that stuck out beyond the brim of his hat. Small hobbit-children ran after the cart all through Hobbiton and right up the hill. It had a cargo of fireworks, as they rightly guessed. At Bilbo's front door the old man began to unload: there were great bundles of fireworks of all sorts and shapes, each labelled with a large red G and [an] elf rune.

J.R.R Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (London: Harper Collins, 1992), 36-37.

Tolkein's prose is pretty mellifluous, but his poetry simply sings. Here is one extract, comparatively simple, but one of my favourites:

O slender as a willow wand! O clearer than clear water!

O reed by the living pool! Fair River-daughter!

O spring time and summer time, and spring again after!

O wind on the waterfall, and the leaves' laughter!

Ibid., 139.

And of course one could not close a Tolkien post without the last two lines from the Namárië song...

Namárië! Nai hiruvalyë Valimar.
Nai elyë hiruva. Namárië!

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German Film Festival

The New Zealand Goethe-Institut is running a festival of German film in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin and New Plymouth. Auckland dates are 10th - 16th October. Programme here.

All in a day's work...

Yesterday I wrote a letter to Dame Judi Dench:

You may (or may not) know that Dame Judi took part in the earliest modern revivals of the York mystery plays throughout the 1950s. She was an angel in the 1951 Festival of Britain revival and played the Virgin Mary (one of her first professional roles) in 1957.

So on the off-chance that she might reply, I wrote asking what it was like to be part of those early performances, how the play cycle fitted into a post-war society, and how it was viewed by the people of York at the time.

York Minster Mystery Plays June 2016

'Have you come far?' 

- York Minster Mystery Plays volunteer to me

This post is rather late, given that we saw the plays on the 22nd June and it is now the beginning of September... still, better late than never! The reason for the delay is that I have been writing up a review of the plays as an academic paper, and my little brain does not like working on two things at once. Academia comes before blogging, so there you are. However, now that I have finished my paper, which is currently languishing in a long-suffering editor's inbox awaiting review, it is time to turn my attention to my rather neglected blog.

The Minster production of the mystery plays was the original inspiration for this year's English trip - their timing, just a few of months after handing in my MA thesis, was happily fortuitous and an excellent excuse for another trip back to Blighty. So back to Blighty I went, or more specifically back to York - this time with both my Grandmas, which made it even more special.

Despite being born a Lancashire rose I am very fond of the white rose county and of York in particular, which despite visiting only twice I have quite fallen in love with. So it was very nice to be back!

We went to a matinee performance of the plays, which turned out to be a good thing as the running time, billed at three and a half hours, ended up being nearer four. Thanks to jetlag, if we had gone in the evening I would probably have been gently snoozing long before Doomsday. On second thoughts, perhaps I wouldn't, as the Minster - all stone and shadow - was distinctly chilly.

By happy forethought, we had front row seats. It was a full house - testament to the popularity of the plays and this production in particular, which does seem to have been a fairly resounding success both with the critics and the general public. The Minster's nave had been converted into seating for around a thousand people - the third nearest the stage was flat but the back two-thirds was raked scaffolding, soaring up and back towards the West Window. 

The stage and set were huge, spread over four playing levels and linked by a series of wide, broad steps. Like the seating, the set reached upwards and backwards, almost to the top of the organ atop the quire screen. This kind of scale was of course the complete antithesis to the original performances of the play cycle, which were staged on small, mobile pageant wagons, but it worked well. Firstly, it evoked the scale and sweep of the cycle, which spans Biblical history from Creation to Doom, and secondly, well, such a big stage was necessary to accommodate the huge cast! This numbered roughly a hundred and forty, all except one (Philip McGinley, playing Christ) unpaid volunteers and many of them from the local community who have been performing in various productions of the plays for years (sometimes decades).

Out of so many characters, it is hard to pick favourites, but Philip McGinley was very good as Christ - though he puzzled me somewhat by making his first entrance clad rather incongruously in jeans and T-shirt but appearing thereafter in more conventional whitey-grey robes. Toby Gordon, as Lucifer, was (perhaps worryingly...) even better, but he reminded me of Dominic Cooper and once this thought had popped into my head it wouldn't pop out again. Ruby Baker as Mary and Mark Comer (one of the recurring devotees of the mystery plays) as Joseph were also excellent. Abraham I remember chiefly for the fact that he had to read his lines off a piece of paper hidden under his cloak (clearly someone was ill and he gamely stepped into the breach), Noah and Mrs Noah for their comic sparring, and Herod for his massive golden cape which spread over the entire stage and required an army of minions to manoeuver.

This version presented eighteen pageants (the original medieval play cycle has about forty-seven), though several of these consisted of two or three of the original short pageants run together into a longer section. The Middle English script had been 'lightly modernised,' retaining the alliterative rhythm of the original while introducing a few modern touches, such as Noah's 'Don't touch - the paint's not dry!' (said to God, inspecting the ark) and Lucifer's wail of 'It's not fair!' while being thrown into hell.

My two favourite episodes were the Creation and the Passion - the former for its colour, light and incredibly lifelike animal puppets, and the latter (which is really the heart of the entire cycle) for its solemn grandeur. Runners-up were the Nativity, for its tableaux effect, and the Entry into Jerusalem, for its movement and momentum.

No photographs of the actual performance - alas, this was not the free and easy Pop-Up Globe. But there are quite a few on the production's website, here.

2018: Summer of Mysteries

Not one but two productions of English mystery play cycles are planned for the summer of 2018: a wagon production of the (abridged) York cycle, and a version of the Chester plays.

Keep an eye on their respective websites (York Mystery Play Supporters Trust and Chester Mystery Plays).

‘It's not fair! You’ve not seen the last of me —’

Lucifer, The Last Judgement

Mike Poulton, The York Mystery Plays in a New Version (London: Nick Hern Books, 2016), 123.

Springtime

In celebration of the first day of spring, here is an extract from my favourite Middle English poem - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - describing the waning of winter and the coming of spring.

Bot thenne the weder of the worlde wyth wynter hit threpes,

Colde cleges adoun, cloudes uplyften,
Schyre schedes the rayn in schowres ful warme,
Falles upon fayre flat, flowres there schewen.
Both groundes and the greves grene ar her wedes,
Bryddes busken to bylde, and bremlych syngen
For solace of the softe somer that sues therafter
          bi bonk;
And blossumes bolne to blow
Bi rawes rych and ronk,
Then notes noble innoghe
Ar erde in wod so wlonk.

Modern English translation by moi:

But then the weather of the world with winter it contends,
Cold shrinks down, clouds drift away,
Brightly falls the rain in showers full warm,
Falling on fair fields, flowers there growing.
Both ground and groves, green are their weeds 
Birds begin to build, and bravely sing
For solace in the soft summer that follows thereafter
        on every bank
And blossoms swell to bloom
In the hedgerows rich and rank;
Then many notes noble enough
Are heard in the wood so glorious.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight l.504-515, in ed. A. C. Crawley Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Everyman, London 1970).

Playing the System

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